Old Hand At New Drugs

Discovery Still Thrills Neurogen's New Ceo

BRANFORD — William Koster spent his career as a ``big pharma'' guy, developing new drugs and working his way up to a vice presidency at Bristol-Myers Squibb.

He became so accustomed to riding helicopters and limousines between company sites in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut that he didn't know how to get into Manhattan by any other means.

Today, however, the 57-year-old Koster has given up his helicopter perk to take on the challenge of developing new medicines at Neurogen Corp., the oldest of the state's growing crop of biotechnology drug developers.

As the company's new chief executive, his mission is to get Neurogen's drugs onto the market, where they can bring in revenue and start helping people with Alzheimer's disease, anxiety, inflammation and obesity.

It's an expertise he developed during a career spanning 30 years in the pharmaceutical business.

``It's something that never gets out of your blood,'' Koster said of success in developing new drugs. ``We're going to replicate it here.''

And Neurogen needs someone right now who knows how to get drugs to market. Founded in 1989 as the first Connecticut biotechnology company to emerge from Yale University research, Neurogen is long past its early start-up days.

The publicly held company has a pipeline of drug candidates, but has reached a point at which it needs to generate revenue from sales of its own drugs, as opposed to getting money through research collaborations with partners such as Pfizer.

And where chief executives of young companies often need to have an almost evangelical zeal to sell their business, Neurogen's board went looking for a chief executive who had more practical experience in the drug arena.

The search took more than a year, but Koster was appointed chief executive in September, succeeding Harry Penner Jr., who is now the ``ambassador'' to Connecticut's life science companies within the newly created state Office of Bioscience.

Penner had pharmaceutical experience, too, having run Novo Nordisk's American operations prior to coming to Neurogen. But where Penner trained in law, Koster trained in science.

Koster grew up in Teaneck, N.J., the son of a homemaker and a corporate tax manager who at one point served on President Eisenhower's tax advisory council. During a research trip to Florida as a Colby College student he trekked through Florida swampland, collecting and analyzing plant samples and flirting with the idea of becoming a marine biologist.

He liked the idea of marrying science and business, and thought of getting an M.B.A. after college, but the science side attracted him more, and he went on to get his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at Tufts University.

He began working in medicinal chemistry at E.R. Squibb & Sons Inc. at a time when the company was small, with a research budget of about $40 million. Koster spent most of his Squibb years working in infectious diseases, and won an award for being one of the discoverers of the antibiotic Azactam.

After Bristol-Myers bought Squibb, Koster nearly left to start a biotech company in the Boston area, but Bristol-Myers persuaded him to stay and gave him responsibility for the company's biological research in heart and metabolic diseases.

During the ensuing years, Koster rebuilt the company's molecular biology, protein biology and pharmacology units, and later became responsible for the company's drug discovery efforts.

He also had a hand in the company's installation of its ``Haystack'' system for quickly finding the most promising new compounds, and building the four-story research wing that houses it at the company's Wallingford campus. The construction and equipment cost more than $50 million.

Koster spent his last few years at Bristol-Myers working on the business side of the operation. He did some of the early work on Bristol-Myers' $1 billion acquisition of a 20 percent stake in ImClone Systems and its cancer drug Erbitux, which was recently rejected by the federal Food and Drug Administration.

ImClone now faces federal inquiries into its activities, and Koster won't say much about his involvement other than that he stopped working on ImClone to focus on Bristol-Myers' $7.8 million acquisition of DuPont Pharmaceuticals.

Koster retired from Bristol-Myers just shy of his 30th anniversary when he took the Neurogen job. He likes that the company has a stable of drug candidates to treat a number of diseases and isn't just a one-trick pony with a single drug to develop.

The company in the future will focus more on getting its own drug candidates into later stages of development before signing up pharmaceutical partners to market the drugs, he said.

In its younger days, Neurogen created early partnerships with companies such as Pfizer and gave them rights to market the drugs they discovered, getting a percentage of the sales in return.